Candidate Engagement Forges Lasting Relationships

Any good advocacy campaign involves building long-lasting relationships with people in power.  Our role as advocates is often to educate lawmakers about the issues, connect them to affected constituents, and carefully craft our messages and strategies so they appeal to the particular interests and concerns of each individual official. 

Building these relationships takes time.  Advocates must ask probing questions, listen carefully to understand each official’s motivations and interests, and provide good follow-through.

Candidates running for office (especially those who have never been elected) are often overlooked as targets in advocacy campaigns, considered too low on the totem pole to even talk to. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Few if any national leaders begin their political careers on the national stage, having cut their teeth vying for and winning local elections, building up their name recognition and expertise, and continuously striving for the next big office.  Today’s PTA candidates are tomorrow’s national leaders.                  

Furthermore, both novice candidates and incumbents seeking another term are eager learners.  They want to connect with the communities they aspire to represent and find out what makes people—voters, actually—tick.  And they often spend extra-ordinary amounts of time building their positions on the issues, staking out what they are for and against, and promising important constituents how they will champion their causes if elected to public office.

In fact, a “wait-until-they’re-elected” attitude can often be “too little, too late.”  Newly elected officials may have already been reached as candidates on the other side of your issue, and may have even pledged to support the opposition.  Sure, pledges are ‘made to be broken’ but every good politician works hard to keep his or her promises. 

More importantly, an educated candidate is more likely to be a thoughtful and fair policymaker.  Nothing is more harmful to the causes we care about than ignorance and simple-minded thinking, which often leads to simple-minded, incomplete, and counter-productive legislation and policy proposals.

So how do we open the door to educate current and future leaders?

While we may not have fat checkbooks to ease our way into the electoral process, we have something much more valuable for candidates: real people and the real issues they care about.

One great way to start fostering relationships and finding out where candidates stand on the issues is the candidate questionnaire.  Dose of Change has prepared a simple How-To guide on how to develop and execute a candidate questionnaire.  Click on the document attached to the bottom of this post to get started!